[INTERVIEW] Deadstream Writers and Directors Vanessa and Joseph Winters
Cat: Your film Deadstream is coming to physical release in just a few days. Congratulations. How amazing? How does it feel to see your work come to physical media when we're in a world of streaming?
Vanessa: It's exciting because also because at least me personally, I love physical media, so there's just something about holding it [physical media].
Joseph: It’s really exciting. In our basement, the walls are lined with physical media. It's been really important to us and I feel like horror consumers generally like to collect things. Physically display them, and that's how we are. So when I found out first there'd be a DVD release, we were ecstatic about that. And then it shocked us later when we found out there would be a Blu-ray and a Steel Book. So I couldn't be happier with it.
Joseph Winter and Vanessa Winters
Cat: When did you know you both wanted to be horror film makers? Was there a defining moment for you?
Vanessa: Mine didn't happen until college because I didn't know I wanted to be a filmmaker, so I I took an intro to film class and was like ohh this is it. This is the rest of my life. I wish it hadn't been four years into college. And then I quickly found my way into horror. I mean, it was kind of just genre sci-fi and horror. it all happened really fast once it finally happened.
Joseph: For me my earliest, just as long as I can remember, I've been absolutely obsessed with horror and Halloween, and the first kind of movie I was ever interested in was horror from the very beginning. I remember in the 80s’, my dad rented the making of Michael Jackson's Thriller from Blockbuster. That changed my life because when we were watching it; I've seen the zombies pull the prosthetics off their face and makeup trailers. I remember just being so captivated by it and. Thinking someone is creating these people. There are artists working on this and from that point forward, I didn't just want to be involved with movies, I wanted to be involved with horror movies and genre, in general, but that was my true passion.
Vanessa: Well, it's cool where Joseph was born in LA and in his apartment complex, he had neighbours that were film makers, so it was just a part of his world. Where for me, I didn't even know. You know, that wasn’t a thing that was even part of my universe, when I was little. That's pretty small.
Cat: Found Footage is quite a niche subgenre of horror. However, we're used to seeing it depicted quite terrifyingly. You know, there's this whole thing about it where it's, you know, incredibly scary. What made you want to make a comedy film footage movie?
Joseph: I got really excited by the challenge of it and I think that we love found footage. We also love 80s’ creature features, so this idea of maybe combining something that was found footage, but also wanted to go very Evil Dead towards the end. I just kept thinking like could we pull that off? I'm literally sitting here in my audience. My favourite movie of all time? Awesome.
Vanessa: I think as soon as the idea popped into my head, where we were talking about a comedic main character and then we were talking about an exploding head happening later and I just started thinking, could we pull that off where the audience wouldn't just reject it right off the bat?
Joseph: For me, it was a really interesting challenge. Interesting fun challenge. I know there have been horror comedy found footage before, but I hadn't seen them. They were not like the mainstream ones that were happening. A little bit early on in my life, I got Army of Darkness on VHS in my stocking and we watched it. I didn't know there were other Evil Dead movies at the time, and we watched it and it. Blew me away. The tone, everything about it. I couldn't believe it existed. And my dad and I loved it. We watched it a lot and that kind of shaped me. So when we were talking about what we would do that's unique, we started to pull in that influence and by then in college, Vanessa had been well versed in Evil Dead stuff, we got on the same page totally. And I think that you can see that influence in the film.
Vanessa: I don't know if Joseph could make a horror movie that wasn't a horror comedy.
Cat: Throughout Deadstream you use a live stream format, which in and of itself is absolutely so cool and unique. What were the logistics of the tech setup for filming the film?
Vanessa: Yeah, it was really a big thing. I wish our DP was here to talk about it because he was such a big part of the process, but we kind of all got together and we just started thinking. I mean, we're film makers, we're not Youtubers, but if we were to do this, if we were to live stream it, how would we do it? What kind of gear would we need? How would we move through the house and set things up? And there's definitely creative liberties taken where it doesn't match up perfectly, but we really came at it like that and it started with just camera tests in our basement and there we ran into tons of problems. It actually took a lot of fine tuning and I think we started to gain a respect for the art of Life stream as we were doing. Our DP put so much into getting the camera rig right and he actually ended up mounting two different cameras on to Shawn's head so that we could cut between two different angles and even getting the lamp light the main headlight that you see throughout the film. Getting that sculpted correctly and getting the brightness to work and everything it was, it was a big process, but we kind of just went at it as if we were going to do it for real.
Joseph: The thing I wanna add to this is what we discovered was that we thought the fidelity of the Wi-Fi would be different, like it wouldn't be quite as good as it is in the movie, but I was like theoretically you could pull this off. What we learned from doing it is that that is still very much science fiction the way we did it, because even like the way what we ended up putting on me, the way the camera is, anytime I change position. If I went from standing to sitting or laying down, we would have to find a way to cut and adjust the arm like to a completely different part and like reset it because there's no way you could actually pull this off and be in frame the entire time, and have all the tech as it currently is with their gimbals actually stay calibrated and stuff. So basically as it happened in the film it's not yet possible to do it that way. So it was quite a big challenge for us on set.
Cat: Sounds tough! So Deadstream and the found footage is very much a homage to DIY and I absolutely love seeing that in the horror filmmaking space. What were some of the challenges you had to overcome during filming and post production?
Vanessa: I'll say one thing about production, OK? One thing that we were super lucky to have is that our creature designer Troy Larson and our effects makeup artist Michaela Kester are huge horror fans and have a very similar sense of humor and just love gore. So when we all got together, there was this fusion of ideas and it really helped the challenges of filming on set because the weather was very extreme. The majority of the movie was shot when it was very hot, which makes it very hard for prosthetic application, so they were very, very good out of passion, working around the less than ideal conditions. Then it also got very cold by the time we finally finished filming because we had big breaks in between the shooting days. We had prosthetics in the water and all kinds of stuff. So I would say that they were a big help in problem solving.
Joseph: The thing I will highlight as a major challenge that actually is both, it was pre-production, production and very heavily in post production. It was a thing that constantly loomed over us, which is the timing. Having it being real time meant that we couldn't trim here and save some time and we'll just cut to him already in the bathroom, which we couldn't do any of that. So Vanessa had a stopwatch on set and every time there were actions she would time it and it had to hit certain times in order to progress with the movie because we knew we couldn't show people a movie where it's actually real time of somebody walking in the space and taking their time. But it was so hard and we knew on set we're not hitting the times like we just aren't. We knew that we had a movie that was too long, so that challenge continued to post production where we were facing the reality of a 108 minute movie or something when it needed to be under nine. I don't know exactly what it was, but it was way too long. So then we had to figure out yet again with ADR and other ways to really just cut the minutes like several minutes out of it.
Cat: What were some of the standout moments for you while writing or filming Deadstream?
Vanessa: The bathtub scene for me is one of my most proud, proud moments because when we were writing it, it got cut several times where we took it out and then we put it back in, and then logistically, getting two people in a bathtub to have a fight was really hard. The camera angles are really hard because they're so close for a close up fight like that. So it's a scene where we rehearsed a lot in our own bathtub where I was playing a corpse. With a shower curtain over me until we got it to read on camera and then on the day we still weren't sure if we were going to be able to do it, the stunt performer was really awesome. Her name was Ariel Lee, her suit, as soon as it got wet, would weigh an extra 40 pounds, so just having that on and then being in the bathtub it was really crazy. It ended up taking like 14 hours to shoot.
Joseph: So for me I think the. Thing that I'm very most proud of is the gag. There's a small child under a sheet, a lump and then jump scares after Sean. And in the theaters that we saw it in on the festival tour, is the biggest jump scare. It was very simple and stupid what the actual gag was, there was just a wadded up, built and it was duct taped onto a rope and the sound guy was under the bed and was just following a queue and he was pulling it, just softly enough to make it look like it's breathing, which was amazing. I feel like that's the thing that makes it work. There was the subtle movement and then he pulled it and it worked on take one. Don't know why it worked but it did and it's I think the best. Part of the movie.
Cat: One of the special features on the Blu-ray is true scary stories from the set of Deadstream. Do you have a scary story from the set that you can share with readers?
Joseph: Well, there's so many that come to mind. I will say that in my personal experiences there were people on set that were having them and I was not. It's possible because I was just too, like stressed about the movie, I was just too in my head to care that it was scary. But on the very last day of production we went in to wrap the set. Everyone had left and we had stripped everything out of it, then the House needed to be sealed up because there's trespassers, and that's what we promised to do. So there'd be no way to get back into the house. And my friend was like, you gotta record an EVP in there or I will hate you if you do that. I was like, OK, OK, I'm going to do it. So I told everyone to leave the house, I'm going to walk into what was the master bedroom in the movie and I'm going to be by myself and I'm going to record a voice memo. And I'm going to ask some questions in the dark, and I did, and no one was in the entire house, and it was super dark. And this is the room everyone said they could feel something, like, really dark. So I started saying if anybody's there say something or like some stupid thing, I don't know what I'm doing and. I got maybe. 40 seconds in and I just bolted. I just like ran out because I didn't feel anything, but it just struck me as how alone and dark everything is in a place that every, like, finally the production stress melted off and I just realised, like, how vulnerable and stupid I am in that moment. So anyway, that's the most scared I got.
Vanessa: I'm not very not very ghost sensitive. I've never had a ghostly experience. But in the early times of working on the house, we had a construction worker come in. Who had grown up in the area and he was coming to help to make sure the house was structurally safe. Anyway, on the second floor he just gets this look on his face and he's just a really big guy, this is the kind of guy that looks like he could take out ten other guys. And he's got this really scared look on his face and he starts telling us about how he broke into the house when he was a teenager and he's pointing to this one window and there was a woman standing at that window. He was still scared as an adult because of this experience he had as a kid, he was so convinced that he had seen a woman standing in this window on the second floor of the house
Thank you so much to Joseph and Vanessa Winters for the interview and discussing the release of their film Deadstream!
Deadstream has now released on Blu-Ray and is available to purchase
